That Sex Scene on Last Night’s “Girls”

Last week, I wrote a column about Lena Dunham’s HBO show “Girls.” I had a bunch of abstract, cranky, intellectual goals: I wanted to pluck “Girls” out of the debate about Millennials, for starters. I wanted to analyze its critical reception. I wanted to put the discussion of “privilege” in a different light. And I wanted to talk about “Girls” specifically as television.

But that’s just one way of doing criticism, and last night’s excellent episode, “One Man’s Trash,” deserves a more direct response.

In TV terms, this was basically a “bottle episode” set in one location: after an opening scene in which Ray throws a huge tantrum, the rest takes place inside a pretty Greenpoint brownstone, and it’s about a three-day affair that Hannah has with a forty-two-year-old doctor named Joshua (Patrick Wilson), who’s separated from his wife. But for me, the whole thing came together in the episode’s final scenes. When everything’s over, and Joshua has left for work and Hannah is alone in his house, she does a few things. She gets the paper from the stoop. Then she reads it while eating toast with jam—instead of, say, snooping. (Jessa would probably have burned the house to the ground. Marnie would have left a day earlier. Shoshanna would have been so confused that she might have ended up as the guy’s second wife.) Then Hannah makes the bed. She takes out the garbage and puts it in the correct can. She walks home.

All of this takes place with only musical scoring, as does an unusual amount of the episode. (It’s beautifully directed by Richard Shepard.) What Hannah does is adult and responsible, and it’s notable that she does it after a crash course in intimacy—which begins with her dream-like impulse to pursue a handsome stranger, ends with a vulnerable fiasco of a speech, and is punctuated by her refusal to call the guy “Joshua” instead of “Josh,” no matter how many times he asks. Yet the experience is a meaningful one, and it changes her in ways that won’t necessarily be visible to anyone she knows.

For all her Daisy-like charm, Hannah really can be amazingly solipsistic: she pushes for intimacy and confessions, but when Josh tells her a childhood sex story, she brushes him off. She can’t imagine how a forty-something doctor might feel after a divorce, or why he might not want to share—her idea of closeness is more like a car crash. On the other hand, Hannah is not exactly wrong to think there’s something strange going on here, because in three days, the pair create something powerful: as if extending a dare, they egg one another on to stay, play ping-pong half-naked, eat, relax, “come look at the moon.” Similar to last year’s episode in which Hannah went back to her home town, the episode rejiggers the series’ basic structure, and it reminded me (as “Girls” often does) of Louie CK’s jagged FX series “Louie,” another comedy that takes regular structural risks, including the risk of not being funny.

There’s something else in the episode, too, which I’d never seen on television, and it felt more graphic than the theatrical kink delivered with numbing regularity on cable television. (And here I’m going to describe the scene graphically, because it’s the only way to talk about a sex scene of this type.) The first time that Hannah and Joshua have sex, we don’t see it, just the aftermath, as they dress and exchange data (mainly, that he’s married but separated). Their second time is different. Joshua tugs off his shirt then lies back on his bed. Hannah unbuckles his belt, and she ducks down to the right of the camera out of the frame. Joshua gazes at the ceiling, closes his eyes, and mutters: “I want you to make me come, O.K. Make me come, Hannah.”

Patrick Wilson is a gorgeous guy and it’s a sexy scene. It’s also a reasonably familiar scenario, since we’ve seen plenty of men get blowjobs on adult dramas and comedies. But Hannah flips it and reverses it. She rises into the frame and softly asks Joshua to make her come instead. He does, using his hand. The camera doesn’t cut away: instead, it drifts even closer to their faces as they kiss. This is the opposite of the sex we’d seen between her and Adam, in which Hannah scrabbled to follow his lead, or to negotiate (“not there!”), or pick up clues to his fantasies. Hannah may be self-centered, but in bed she’s almost slavishly generous and, in a superficial sense, the model of “good, giving and game”—Dan Savage’s playbook for grownup sex.

With that nice pharmacist in her home town, she took that bravado so far that he finally had to growl “come on” to get her to stop spooling out fake fantasies. And while Hannah apparently told Adam that he “made her whole body feel like a clit,” you have to wonder whether that was the truth, or if it was Hannah’s way of convincing herself that even though Adam never paid all that much attention to that part of her body, anywhere he touched was O.K.

Either way, this short, potent sequence was a departure from any sex we’ve seen so far on “Girls,” because it wasn’t played for laughs. It stood in contrast with the first-season scene of Marnie rolling her eyes at her attentive boyfriend, and also with the second-season scene of Marnie getting slammed into the starfish position by a pretentious, detached lover (and maybe enjoying the novelty, since he demands nothing). In fact, the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television, which consists largely of the same cynical motifs recycled again and again: perfect lingerie, interchangeable young female bodies (while male body types vary wildly, in age and shape), the sort of “porn with purchase” that studs prestige cable series from “Boardwalk Empire” to “House of Lies.”

Anyway, afterward, and after Hannah faints in his fancy shower, their placid affair peels apart. She starts having therapeutic revelations—half-truth, half-grandiosity—which Josh tolerates with a pleasant but distant smile. She keeps pushing these conversations, as she often does, using intimacy as an extreme sport, and maybe as a punishment for Josh for letting her in and for begging her to stay (after she begged him to beg her to stay)—basically, for offering a fantasy of steak in the refrigerator and sweaters that cost as much as her month’s rent. That’s not something Josh can really offer, so maybe Hannah had to bite her own arm off to get away. The whole thing reminded me of an old quote (a fake quote from Lenin, but just because it’s fake doesn’t mean it isn’t useful): “The emotions are not skilled workers.”

At the moment, this is my new favorite episode, or it would be if I didn’t hate lists so much. It made me think about the chorus of critics within “Girls,” like Ray, who lectured Hannah that intimacy wasn’t a legitimate subject for art, or Sandy, who said that nothing happened in Hannah’s essay, that it was about “all the nonsense that goes through your brain when you’re just trying to kill time.” Ray and Sandy might dislike this episode or be bored by it; I’m certain it will have its haters. (And actually, maybe “One Man’s Trash”—perfect title—was the essay that Hannah gave Sandy, the one she defensively described as the story of how “a girl’s whole perspective on who she was and her sexuality changed.”) But what has two thumbs and really loved the episode? This critic.

Photograph by Jessica Miglio/HBO.

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.